MARIANNE
DREAMS
Almeida
Theatre, London N1
Opened 19 December, 2007
***
The Almeida is often caricatured in some quarters as catering
principally to trendy, middle-class Islingtonians. It's a lazy
stereotype that I have never subscribed to, but watching the theatre's
first ever family production brought me close.
Catherine Storr's 1958 children's novel has two distinct strains to it.
There is the unreality, or surrealism, of ten-year-old Marianne's fever
dreams as, bedridden with mononucleosis, she finds her drawings of a
mysterious house the boy trapped inside it coming to life (at one
point, projections of dozens of watching eyes on the backdrop recall
Dalí's designs for Hitchcock). This dreamworld is adroitly
caught by Moira Buffini's adaptation and Will Tuckett's production,
which unsurprisingly uses dance to express the unarticulated emotions
of Marianne and Mark, the boy with whom she seems to be sharing her
dreams. But the "real world" component, in which Marianne is tended by
her mother, a home tutor and – wonder of wonders! – a doctor who makes
daily house calls, seems now to constitute a particular social flavour
of nostalgia; it is one rather more flannelly-comforting than
Islington-cool, but no less bourgeois. It is, in effect, the shared
middle-class, fictional utopia of English children's literature through
the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the golden age that
never was but which we have been conditioned to hanker after.
Buffini and Tuckett downplay the social and historical specificity by
blending these scenes seamlessly into a single continuous 80-minute
piece where, in Marianne's delirium, reality and dreams may seldom be
distinguishable. Marianne (Selina Chilton, who stops just this side of
being excessively wide-eyed and "childlike") and polio-sufferer Mark
(Mark Arends, who has more complexity and ambivalence to get his teeth
into) are often carried back to their resting positions by Jack James's
doctor-figure after terpsichorean or other exertions, and the furniture
in Anthony Ward's design may roll on and offstage as easily in the
waking as in the dream world. (I must admit that my own
Christmas-cold-medicated fug may also have played some part in this
impression of woozy fluidity.) There is some uncertainty of tone in the
double twist of the ending when Marianne meets Mark in the waking
world; overall, though, the disquiet of rebellious dreams is fully
counterbalanced by the reassurance of the warm, cosy bed on waking.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
Return to index of
reviews
for the year 2007
Return to master
reviews
index
Return to main theatre
page
Return to Shutters
homepage